On the screen now danced images almost totally abstracted from the realities of the filmed documentaries from the war.
They were whirling columns of smoke; they were like the vast, dark interior of a huge thunderhead cloud through which a glider soars, illuminated only by the flashes of lightning as for split seconds they revealed a fraction of some horrible reality: A burning ocean with screaming human faces bobbing in the flames. The whirling tracks of a tank going across some writhing human body and leaving it flat in its tracks, sprawling like an empty coat dyed red. And then the swirling, howling darkness closing in again....
"Interesting eh?" A voice broke through his cataleptic trance and the other answered: "Beautiful; almost a classical case. Great plasticity of imagination." "Yes; that's exactly what sets me wondering; the fellow should have cracked up by all the rules of the game." "How do we know that he hasn't? Maybe he was psycho and they didn't notice; they had some godawful asses for psychiatrists in war medicine. It's quite a possibility; well, his image production is ebbing now; I don't expect anything new of significance, what do you think?" "Now; we've got what we wanted anyway. Let's take him out of it; but go easy on the rheostats."
The projector stopped. The masterful, the ghostly fingers which had been playing on the keyboard of his mind very slowly receded from a furious fortissimo to a pianissimo. At first only the flutterings of the diaphragm eased, then the violent palpitations of a foreign pulse slipped off the heart; the liberated lungs expanded; tremors were running through the body as through the ice of a frozen river at spring; and then at last the mind escaped from its captivity.
Gradually as in a cinema after the show the lights reappeared. Blinking, Lee stared at the man who stood over him taking his pulse; it was Bondy. Mellish stood at the foot of the table with his back to Lee; he seemed to watch some apparatus which made noises like a teletype machine. Swinging his legs off the table Lee said:
"I'm okay; you needn't hold my hand."
But then he noticed that he wasn't. His head spun, his whole body was wet with perspiration, he felt very weak and limp. He swayed and buried his face in his hands trying to gain his balance, trying to shake off the trance. "Excuse me," he said. "I'm a bit dizzy."
As he opened his eyes again the two medics were standing right in front of him and smiling down on him with their bland, professional smiles. Lee felt the upsurge of intense dislike. He had seen those smiles before, often—too often: they seemed to be standard equipment with the medical profession whenever a fellow was about to be dispatched to the "table", or worse, to the psychopathic ward. Instinct told him that there was something in the air and also that his best bet would be a brave show of normalcy:
"This test, these new methods of psychoanalysis, they are extremely interesting," he said with an effort.